Anyone For ContraptionCamp?

I’ve long been a fan of Wallace & Gromit‘s mad contraptions – the sort of machine that makes life infinitely more complicate than it really should be, just to get a simple job done. Well I hadn’t realised until recently that these are in fact Rube Goldberg Machines.

I was reminded of this last week when a friend showed me a brilliant YouTube video called “How do you take your portraits?”

At the end of that, there were some other suggestions, which inlcuded:

The Cog – Honda

And my favourite has to be:

This Too Shall Pass – OK GO

My Own Feeble Attempt

These great examples set me thinking… maybe I could build one too? Well, I found a few bits and pieces and stuck some stuff together. Originally I had about 7 steps, but the first one was terribly unreliable and often I didn’t get beyond step 2. Here’s what wassupposed to happen:

The unreliable first version

Marble starts at top right of the picture, travelling down two knitting needle tracks and into the red Lego jeep

The Jeep heads off down the ruler and hits Babo’s Bird on the stack of DVDs

Babo’s Bird jumps off the DVDs and onto one end of a see-saw

At the other end, Wedgehead goes Up and pokes the CD balanced on top of the other DVDs

This rattles another marble out of its resting hole in the long metal ruler and it rolls down and around the bendy corner into the cardboard tube

Exiting the tube, the marble hits the space shuttle which fires into the dominos

The dominos topple and eventually hit the light plastic pot tower at the end